Jacob Christensen

Contemporary social science, as we all know, relies heavily on statistical information and telephone surveys or questionnaires have been an important instrument in gathering information from and about the public. At this point I may as well admit that I in recent years more often than not have assigned mailed questionnaires to my dustbin (perhaps it was the prospect of using an hour on filling out a questionnaire about drug and alcohol use that did it – I don’t use drugs, in fact I have never even not inhaled, and as Nick Aylott can testify, my alcohol consumption is minimal. Alcohol and migraines, even of the milder sort, are not a happy couple).

Anyway, some years ago Danish authorities made some changes about the rules for contacting individuals for research purposes which meant that it was relatively easy to keep researchers from contacting you and in a recent paper, the Danish Statistical Bureau tells us that now fever than 690.000 people (about 12% of the total population) have signed up for “protection against researchers”, as the system is called. The consequences are of cause of some importance – there is a huge loss of potential respondents which again will have long-term effects on the preparation and evaluation of public policies.

The Statistical Bureau is in fact able to calculate some patterns here: People on Sjælland and in the Metropolitan area are more likely to opt out as are younger people and those with a high school diploma. Unemployed and students are also overrepresented (yes, I admit that it sounds a bit odd that you can do research on people who have opted out of the system, but as long as you can get the information without contacting them, everything is fine).

The Bureau has no good explanations for why people choose to opt out. The head of the Bureau points out that the formulation “forskerbeskyttelse” (which I have translated into “protection against researchers”) on the formula you have to send to your local council when you move may be the culprit. The opt out is also listed along with the opportunity to get protection against local address registers and being contacted by marketing bureaus – two major annoyances to most people. Or maybe we are simply dealing with the phenomenon of questionnaire fatigue.

(The full paper – in Danish – is here)

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